For almost a week now, I've been using Slackware 9.1 (RC-1 released today), and I am having a blast. Slackware doesn't have more than 6-8% of the Linux market these days, but it used to be one of the most-used distros back in the day. Today, many think of Slackware as a true classic, a thought that is often accompanied by a feeling that Slackware is not a user-friendly or an uber-modern Linux distribution. There is some truth in that statement, but there is always the big "But". Read on for our very positive experience with Slackware 9.1-pre. Update: In less than 24 hours since the RC-1, Slackware 9.1 RC-2 is out.

First off you really don't know what you're talking about. If you've ever visited this site before you would know that Eugiena has run just about every distro there is, including the *BSD's.

The point of slackware is to give control to the user. If you don't want to worry about configuring things, by all means use mandrake or redhat, heck just use windows xp.

However, when you use a redhat ar a mandrake or similar, you start to see that there are obvious limitations. They want you to confine yourself to using packages from whatever package manager they have chosen. Sometimes packages break things, sometimes your RPM database gets corrupted.

With slackware you don't have to worry about these things. Let me tell you something.... dependencies are not as big of a problem as many people think. RPM's require other rpms becuase thats what they were built against, but if you build your own software on a system like slack, most likely you aren't going to have to worry about that. When you do your ./configure, it will tell you if you are missing anything.

I'll give you an example. One reason why I was hesitant to use slack was it didn't have gnucash. I hunted around for a package for 9.0, and I couldn't find any. What did I end up doing? I built it my self. The only problem was slack 9 did away with gnome 1.4 /gtk1 libraryies which gnucash requires (hopefully they update to gtk2 soon). I just pulled them off of the slack 8.1 install and I was fine. Try doing that with an rpm distro. I guarentee it would have puked. It's just too easy to make an rpm distro break. If you break slack, you will most likely know how to fix it, because you've done everything yourself, so you know the system.

Just give it a try, you will like it. It takes a little bit of reading, but in the end it's worth it.